'Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller'

By Steve Weinberg

Updated March 27, 2008 9:32 p.m. ET

Chapter 14: A Question of Character

Perhaps the greatest catalyst for Ida Tarbell's foray into Rockefeller's personal life&mdash;a foray going beyond the influence of Standard Oil&mdash;was the strong impression he made on her the only time she saw him in person. That occurred on October 11, 1903, at the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church and Sunday school in Cleveland.

ENLARGE

Courtesy W.W. Norton

Four months earlier, while gathering material for the Standard Oil expos&eacute;, John Siddall had visited the church without announcing himself. Hiram Brown, a Cleveland resident and longtime Rockefeller friend, had talked to him about Rockefeller's church-going schedule. After watching Rockefeller at the pulpit from a front-row seat, Siddall composed a report for Tarbell that said, "My whole impression is that [Rockefeller] began this sort of [church participation] as a part of the oil business and that way back somewhere he got an impression that the devil would get him if he didn't watch out . . . His religion, I should say, is chiefly a sort of ignorant superstition." Even after Siddall learned that Rockefeller sometimes quietly gave contributions to destitute members of the congregation, he could not dispel his doubts.

Later that year, Siddall and magazine sketch artist George Varian accompanied Tarbell on her unannounced visit to the church. She felt "a little mean about it . . . It was taking him unaware." After two hours of observation, she left the church unobtrusively.

Rockefeller emanated power when he spoke to the congregation as a deacon and as a guest preacher. Tarbell was never able to forget that strength, combined with what she considered his uneasy manner in a house of worship. She noted where he positioned himself when not at the lectern: "They say in Cleveland Mr. Rockefeller always sits with his back to the wall when it is possible. So many things can happen behind one's back in any assembly." Rockefeller seemed as uneasy as the children in the Sunday school room, she noted. "Throughout the church service which followed, this same terrible restlessness agitated him. He sat bent forward in his pew, for a moment, his eyes intent on the speaker, then with a start he looked to his right, searching the faces he could see, craning his neck to look backward. Then his eyes would turn again to the speaker, but not stay there."

Fellow churchgoers told Tarbell he had demonstrated such apparent uneasiness for many years. Tarbell found herself surmising, "Fear, fear of the oft-repeated threats of the multitude of sufferers from the wheels of the cars of progress he has rolled across the country . . . It does not matter what it is. It is pitiful, so pitiful, that one cannot watch John Rockefeller sit through a church service and never cease to feel that he is one of the saddest objects in the world."

After seeing Rockefeller in person, Tarbell could not shake the image of his prominent bald head, made that way by a condition known as generalized alopecia, which can make an entire body hairless. She devoted significant thought to Rockefeller's stark physical appearance, wondering if it might somehow be viewed as a punishment for his misdeeds. "Concentration, craftiness, cruelty and something indefinably repulsive are in the [pictures] . . . Brought face to face with Mr. Rockefeller unexpectedly," Tarbell said, "and not knowing him, the writer's immediate thought was 'This is the oldest man in the world&mdash;a living mummy.'" At the time, Rockefeller was sixty-six.

Elderly, but not weak, Tarbell thought: "There is no sense of feebleness with the sense of age; indeed, there is one of terrific power. The disease which in the last three or four years has swept Mr. Rockefel-ler's head bare of hair, stripped away even eyelashes and eyebrows, has revealed all the strength of his great head." After noting Rockefeller's "powerful shoulders and a neck like that of a bull," Tarbell focused on his face. "Eyes more useful for a man of Mr. Rockefeller's practices could hardly be conceived. They are small and intent and steady, and they are as expressionless as a wall. They see everything and reveal nothing." Next came Rockefeller's mouth. "It is only a slit&mdash;the lips are quite lost, as if by eternal grinding together of the teeth, teeth set on something he would have," Tarbell commented. "It is at once the cruelest feature of his face . . . and the most pathetic, for the hard, close-set line slants downward at the corners, giving a look of age and sadness." Tarbell drew a moral from her analysis of Rockefeller's face: "Mr. Rockefeller may have made himself the richest man in the world, but he has paid. Nothing but paying ever ploughs such lines in a man's face, ever sets his lips to such a melancholy angle."

With all those images in her brain, Tarbell could not let go of the Rockefeller saga quite yet. In early 1905, as her Standard Oil expos&eacute; became a bestseller and an instant classic in book form, she decided to write a personality profile of Rockefeller for McClure's Magazine.

Rarely in the torrent of words that formed the book had Tarbell lost sight of Rockefeller's role in the creation, growth, and domination of the trust. A section in volume two of the Standard Oil expos&eacute; demonstrated that oil consumers tended to look upon "Mr. Rockefeller with superstitious awe. Their notion of him was very like that which the English common people had for Napoleon in the first part of the nineteenth century, which the peasants of Brittany have even today for the English&mdash;a dread power, cruel, omniscient, always ready to spring." Nobody else associated with the world's most powerful trust could inspire such fear, Tarbell says. "It is worth noting that while all of the members of the Standard Oil Company followed Mr. Rockefeller's policy of saying nothing, there was no such popular dread of any other one of them." To her credit, rarely did Tarbell portray Rockefeller as personally evil. She set out the facts of his actions, delved into his thoughts as best she could without his cooperation, and let readers reach their own conclusions. Now she would do something different.

Decades later, reflecting in her memoir, Tarbell said, "I was not keen for it. It would have to be done like the books, from documents; that is, I had no inclination to use the extraordinary gossip which came to me from many sources." Insisting on verifiable information to the end, she emphasized, "If I were to do it, I wanted only that of which I felt I had sure proof, only those things which seemed to me to help explain the public life of this powerful, patient, secretive, calculating man of so peculiar and special a genius."

Throughout 1904 and 1905, Tarbell reviewed documents already collected for the corporate history and accumulated new material. "The more intimately I went into my subject, the more hateful it became to me," she commented. "No achievement on earth could justify those methods, I felt. I had a great desire to end my task, hear no more of it. No doubt part of my revulsion was due to a fagged brain."

Just as she put the finishing touches on the Rockefeller character sketch, Tarbell's father became ill and died. Eventually she made peace with her father's passing and continued to draw on his memory when she needed inspiration. In 1905, however, while struggling for the right words to describe Rockefeller, she felt like she was sinking in a "dark sea of loss." She pushed ahead, though, knowing her colleagues at the magazine were counting on her.

Two years after Tarbell observed Rockefeller in church, in July 1905, McClure introduced what would become the most searing, controversial, and influential Rockefeller profile published during his lifetime. Commenting on the timing of publication, he said, "It is not too much to say that he is the founder of a School of Business which is on trial today by the people . . . The growing influence of this school is evident to the most casual observer. The menace it carries with it to individual opportunity and commercial integrity is no longer seriously debated."

McClure explained why the profile spilled over into Rockefeller's religious practice and charitable donations. After all, McClure said, Rockefeller "is not only the founder and the chief beneficiary of this powerful commercial system, he is our present most liberal supporter of Christian Education, Christian Charity, the Christian Church. His contributions cannot but be a powerful defense of his business school." McClure, and Tarbell, firmly believed that "the works of a man's life stand together. They cannot be separated. It is the intimate and intricate relation of the Rockefeller Business Code with the Rockefeller Religious Code that makes it imperative the public study the man and his influence."

Given her own doubts about finding the mental energy to complete the character sketch, as well as the divided opinions about its fairness, Tarbell felt compelled to justify it beyond what McClure wrote. Although beginning to see that her expos&eacute; of Standard Oil might someday lead to the breakup of the trust, she believed her work would remain incomplete unless the man controlling the trust could be unmasked. Tarbell told readers of McClure's Magazine that "a man who possesses this kind of influence cannot be allowed to live in the dark. The public not only has the right to know what sort of man he is; it is the duty of the public to know." How else, she wondered, "can the public discharge the most solemn obligation it owes to itself and to the future to keep the springs of its higher life clean?"

She set up the character sketch by establishing Rockefeller's sterling reputation among the masses, among historians, and among so many journalists other than herself: " 'The most important man in the world' a great and serious newspaper passionately devoted to democracy calls him, and unquestionably this is the popular measure of him." In a discerning passage about the nature of celebrity, she wrote, "His importance lies not so much in the fact that he is the richest individual in the world . . . it lies in the fact that his wealth, and the power springing from it, appeal to the most universal and powerful passion in this country&mdash;the passion for money." Tarbell understood the perverse attraction: "How did he get it, the eager youth asks, and asking, strives to imitate him as nearly as ability and patience permit. Thus he has become an inspirer of American ideals, and his methods have been crystallized into a great national commercial code."

Even those harboring reservations about Rockefeller felt compelled to restrain themselves if they wanted to benefit from his largesse, Tarbell explained: "All over the land those who direct great educational, charitable and religious institutions are asking, 'Can we not get something from him?' Receiving his bequests, they become at least the tacit supporters of the thing for which he stands."

Tarbell did her utmost to demonstrate how the child is often the predictable precursor of the adult. She portrayed Rockefeller's paternal grandfather and father as mixtures of ne'er-do-wells and con men. Even his mother, sainted in his mind, won faint praise at best from Tarbell. While impressed with Rockefeller's youthful persistence at achieving financial independence, she conveyed a quiet horror as she parsed his fascination for accumulating money: "It was combine, save, watch. A sort of mania for saving seemed to possess him. It was over this he brooded from morning to night, and it was the realization of this alone which awakened in his face, already grave with incessant reflections, a sign of joy." It seemed that the admirable desire to make an honest profit turned gradually into a mania for profit no matter how gained, Tarbell came to believe: "It is quite probable that Mr. Rockefeller, natural trader that he was, learned early in his career that unless one has some special and exclusive advantage over rivals in business, native ability, thrift, energy&mdash;however great they may be&mdash;are never sufficient to put an end to competition."

According to Tarbell, by the late 1860s Rockefeller realized "that he had no legitimate superiority over those competing with him in Cleveland which would enable him to be anything more than one of the big men in his line." As a result, he sought an advantage through unfair means: "It lay in transportation, in getting his carrying done cheaper than his neighbors could. It was a very seductive idea to a man with a passion for wealth."

If the maxim is true that a biography reveals as much about the biographer as it does about the subject, then the character sketch of Rockefeller affords the reader a look into Tarbell's psyche with every paragraph. For instance, Tarbell wrestled with traditional religion versus secular belief most of her life, so it is interesting how she presents the details of Rockefeller's vast charitable contributions, then turns his philanthropy against him: "It is evident that his giving is governed by some theory of the percent[age] due to the Lord, though it is evident that he never has gone as high as ten percent! Whatever the percentage he has decided on he distributes cautiously and reverentially . . . The spirit in which he gives is one of plain, hard duty." Tarbell came to believe that Rockefeller was purchasing peace of mind for the hereafter, commenting, "He himself has stated his theory&mdash;'According as you put something in, the greater will be your dividends of salvation!'"

Tarbell examined whether the money donated by Rockefeller to worthwhile causes should be considered tainted. She suggested that Rockefeller could have contributed more to society by playing fair in business than by doling out ill-gained money to needy institutions and individuals: "The principles of the religion he professes are so antagonistic to the principles of the business he practices that the very world which emulates him has been turned into hypocrites and cynics under his tutelage." In her judgment, "Not only has his charity been tainted by the hypocrisy of his life, the church itself has been polluted and many a man has turned away from its doors because of the servile support it gives to the men of whom Mr. Rockefeller is the most eminent type."

Worrying about the degradation of society, Tarbell said, "Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner for the kind of influence he exercises . . . No price is too great to pay for winning. In commerce 'the interest of the business' justifies breaking the law, bribing legislators, defrauding a competitor of his rights."

Tarbell wondered whether the cleansing effects of her Standard Oil expos&eacute; could successfully wipe away the "commercial Machiavellism" of Rockefeller. At times she felt optimistic: "Since the world began her progress has been in proportion to her knowledge and her judgment of the men who symbolized the influence of a period. History is but a museum of dissected heroes, warriors, kings, philosophers, their records stripped bare, their influence traced to their flowering." She hoped that her expos&eacute; would help its readers render a verdict on her subject, that "Rockefeller, much as he dislikes the light, cannot escape the fate of his own greatness. All his vast wealth spent in one supreme effort to evade the judgment of men would be but wasted, for a man can never escape the judgment of the society which has bred him."

What can only be interpreted as an uncharitable and perhaps unwarranted analysis of Rockefeller's sincerity was suddenly softened as she pointed out his positive qualities as a loving husband and father, a faithful churchgoer, a man who avoided carousing and ostentation. Tarbell's ambivalence occasionally became dizzying. At one point she praised Rockefeller for his relative frugality: "Family and servants are trained to strictest economy. There is no more gas burned than is needed, no unnecessary heating . . . This frugality certainly is a welcome contrast to the wanton lavishness which on every side of us corrupts taste and destroys the sense of values." Then, without pause, she turned Rockefeller's frugality against him: "One would be inclined to like Mr. Rockefeller the better for his plain living if somehow one did not feel that here was something more than frugality, that here was parsimony . . . made a virtue."

Tarbell further turned Rockefeller's dislike of ostentation into an indictment by criticizing the appearances of his three family homes&mdash;Forest Hill, outside of Cleveland; Pocantico Hills, near Tarrytown, New York; and the New York City townhouse. She called Forest Hill "a monument of cheap ugliness," and described all three buildings as "unpretending even to the point of being conspicuous" given Rockefeller's means to build something attractive. Her praise for the grounds surrounding the buildings was sincere, however. Rockefeller, Tarbell said, "has the love of noble land. At Forest Hill the park of over four hundred acres is one of great loveliness&mdash;rolling wooded hills, shady ravines, fine fields with splendid trees&mdash;the whole cared for with more than intelligence. There is something like affection gone into the making of this beautiful spot."

Rockefeller devoted part of the grounds to a golf course, so he could play the game day after day, month after month. Tarbell portrayed his golfing as both positive and negative, reaching for a conclusion that seemed speculative at best, and certainly uncharacteristically nasty: "So long as golf occupie[s] him as it does, there is little to fear that Mr. Rockefeller will trouble himself to complete his ownership of the Nation . . . Taking it all in all, however, there is little doubt that Mr. Rockefeller's chief reason for playing golf is that he may live longer in order to make more money."

In paragraph after paragraph, Tarbell attempted to unlock what she saw as the duality of Rockefeller's personality. Because she posed her analysis of his psyche in the form of questions, she seemed to leave open the possibility that perhaps she would accept a positive evaluation of Rockefeller's life if she were to uncover additional evidence. A careful reading of her public and private writings, however, suggests that she had formed a permanent opinion of Rockefeller's dual nature by 1905.

The good Rockefeller, as envisioned by the public before Tarbell's expos&eacute;, seemed like an ideal husband, father, and grandfather, a "quiet, modest church-going gentleman, devoted to Sunday school picnics, golf and wheeling . . . whose chief occupation, outside of business, is giving away as much money as he can." Rockefeller deserved praise for such qualities, Tarbell conceded. But, she asked, "how harmonize it with the Mr. Rockefeller the business world knows, the man with a mask and a steel grip, forever peering into hidden places for money, always more money, planning in secret to wrest it even from friends, never forgetting, never resting, never satisfied?" She wondered, "Is the amiable Mr. Rockefeller a foil for the man before whom the public writhes? Does Mr. Rockefeller know that, when he patiently points out how gentle, charitable and devoted he is, and asks how can it be that a man who is all this can do a business wrong, more people will hesitate and keep silent than before any other face he could present?"

Tarbell did not want to seem immodest. She noted, "It is supposing a great knowledge of human nature . . . to explain Mr. Rockefeller, but that it is a plausible explanation cannot be denied." Yet her intensive study of Rockefeller might qualify her as the Great Explainer. Maybe Rockefel-ler's dual personality could be understood by the maxim that the means justify the ends. Or maybe, Tarbell suggested, Rockefeller possessed a dual nature that would "puzzle" any psychologist, no matter how astute. Perhaps he was "a man whose soul is built like a ship in air-tight compartments . . . one devoted to business, one to religion and charity, one to simple living and one to nobody knows what. But between those compartments there are no doors . . . It is an uncanny explanation, but it may be the true one."

The consequences of Rockefeller's actions could fairly be termed unpleasant, Tarbell maintained. Rockefeller "has done more than any other person to fasten on this country the most serious interference with free individual development which it suffers, an interference which, today, the whole country is stuggling vainly to strike off&mdash;which it is doubtful will be cured, so deep-seated and subtle is it&mdash;except by revolutionary means." Rockefeller, according to Tarbell's evidence, "has introduced into business a spy system of the most odious character. He has turned commerce from a peaceful pursuit to war, and honeycombed it with cruel and corrupt practice, turned competition from honorable emulation to cutthroat struggle."

Tarbell's typically careful reporting gave the Rockefeller character sketch authority. But her judgmental tone, added to the substance behind the judgments, precipitated debate across the nation. Receiving feedback about her mean-spirited profile, Tarbell, so generous to family and friends, tried to prevent the negativity from wounding her. Corresponding with McClure's Magazine reader Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, she revealed on August 8, 1905, that she had found the assignment "repugnant . . . to me personally . . . Most of my friends seem to think that I am getting some kind of satisfaction out of the sordid business." Not so, she said. "It was just one of those things that had to be done; there seemed to be no way for me to get around it. I trust that it has not been useless."

McClure and his business partner, John S. Phillips, discussed whether to reprint the character sketch as a book. They decided against a book version, even though Phillips, for one, thought of Tarbell as a dispenser of "divine pity," a quality "deeper and stronger than benevolence." A New York City correspondent for the Chicago Record-Herald reported that the McClure-Phillips firm "wishes to be known only as an enemy of Mr. Rockefeller's methods, not of Mr. Rockefeller himself."

As the magazine profile resonated during the summer and fall, about four hundred community leaders in Cleveland organized a visit to the Forest Hill estate to show their appreciation for Rockefeller's benefactions and to excoriate Tarbell's portrait. Rockefeller greeted every guest and presented an emotional, brief speech. He refrained from mentioning Tarbell's name or the mean words she had published. His only reaction reached the public indirectly, through Virgil P. Kline, one of his Cleveland lawyers. Kline disputed one portion of the lengthy character sketch, concerning allegations that Rockefeller had treated his boyhood friend James Corrigan unfairly in their financial dealings. Corrigan had eventually sued Rockefeller. Kline emphasized that arbitrators and judges had ruled in Rockefeller's favor against Corrigan.

Much to Tarbell's dismay, Rockefeller continued his silence even after the book version reached bestseller status. "I wanted an answer from Mr. Rockefeller," Tarbell recalled. "What I got was neither direct nor, from my point of view, serious. It consisted of wide and what must have been a rather expensive anonymous distribution of various critical comments."

After the character sketch appeared in print, Standard Oil hired a public relations executive, one of the first employed by any U.S. corporation. Joseph I. C. Clarke, a former New York City newspaper editor, coddled journalists, granted access to Rockefeller, and began to help cultivate an image of him as an engaging elderly gentleman. Clarke encouraged features describing a grandfatherly Rockefeller spending Christmas within the warmth of an adoring family. Rockefeller also agreed to cooperate with Leonard Woolsey Bacon, a minister, on a Standard Oil history meant to rebut Tarbell, though Rockefeller, always reticent about revealing company operations, expressed reservations. Bacon began the project in 1906 but the next year became too ill to continue. Nobody at Standard Oil took the initiative to replace him, and the official history never appeared.

Elbert Hubbard almost surely would have accepted the assignment if offered. From the mid-1890s until his death in 1915, Hubbard helped define the practice of public relations, in addition to founding a publishing house called Roycroft Press and organizing a writers' colony in East Aurora, New York. Hubbard encouraged Rockefeller to reply to Tarbell's findings, commenting, "She shot from cover, and she shot to kill. Such literary bushwackers should be answered shot for shot. Sniping the commercial caravan may be legitimate, but to my mind the Tarbell-Steffens-Russell-Roosevelt-Sinclair method of inky warfare is quite as unethical as the alleged tentacled-octopi policy which they attack."

Writing in Public Relations Journal, Charles F. Hamilton told how Hubbard tried to diminish the impact of Tarbell's Standard Oil expos&eacute; by publishing a pamphlet extolling the trust. A source told Tarbell that Standard Oil had paid for five million copies of Hubbard's broadside and distributed them to schoolteachers, preachers, journalists, and other opinion leaders across the United States. "Hardly were they received in many cases before they were sent to me with angry or approving comments," Tarbell noted, dismissing Hubbard with the adjective "entertaining."

Perhaps the most widely distributed rebuttal came, at least ostensibly, from Gilbert Holland Montague, a twenty-two-year-old Harvard University student who started by writing a senior thesis. Published in book form in 1903, before Tarbell's serialization had ended, The Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company benefited from the counsel of S.C.T. Dodd, the trust's in-house lawyer. Standard Oil paid to disseminate the book to libraries, news organizations, churches, schools, and other venues throughout the country. Tarbell commented that Montague's book "separated business and ethics in a way that must have been a comfort at 26 Broadway."

Criticisms of Tarbell by Rockefeller partisans came and went. So did obviously partisan attacks, such as an article in the Oil City, Pennsylvania, Derrick newspaper under the headline "Hysterical Woman Versus Historical Fact/How Miss Tarbell Distorted a Legitimate Business Deal." Despite the efforts of the public relations practitioners, the anti-Tarbell actions never amounted to more than a feeble attempt to spin the story. Ultimately, as Ron Chernow commented, Rockefeller never spoke out publicly against Tarbell because "he couldn't dispute just a few of Tarbell's assertions without admitting the truth of many others, and a hard core of truth did lie behind the scattered errors." Another Rockefeller biographer, Jules Abels, noted, "It is ironic that conquest by book happened to John D. Rockefeller, who, though an admirer and patron of higher education, was himself a most unbookish person who must have been astounded when the pen proved mightier than the Almighty Dollar."

Because Tarbell's two-part profile of Rockefeller proved so provocative, analysis of it, of its writer, and of its subject never faded completely. Four decades later, Allan Nevins praised Tarbell's history of Standard Oil, for the most part, but excoriated her for the profile. He devoted considerable space to his analysis of her motives for "the shrill abuse of Rockefeller." First, Nevins said, Rockefeller's decision not to set the record straight concerning allegedly false anecdotes fed the hatred of him and seemed to confirm the truth of the lies. Second, the sheer size and dominance of Standard Oil made it a target. Third, "Rockefeller was pictured as a despotic head of his organization, responsible for its every act, when he was simply the chief of a group of powerful men, each largely supreme in his own sphere." Fourth, Rockefeller's critics wrongly doubted the sincerity of his philanthropy, so felt morally justified in attacking him for hypocrisy.

President Theodore Roosevelt, portraying himself as a trust-buster, participated in criticism of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, but Tarbell felt the president's sting too. Generally friendly with reform-minded reporters and editors, Roosevelt seemed out of sorts in the spring of 1906, especially during a speech presented April 14 during a cornerstone-laying ceremony at the House of Representatives. The audience included Supreme Court justices, foreign diplomats, and members of Congress. It is quite likely that Roosevelt delivered the speech in part because of his anger at "The Treason of the Senate," a freshly published series of articles by David Graham Phillips in Cosmopolitan magazine. William Randolph Hearst owned the magazine and was not reluctant to use it to further his desire to become president on a Democratic Party ticket. In 1906, Hearst, already elected to the House of Representatives, was hoping to win the governorship of New York State, presumably as a steppingstone to the White House. Roosevelt disliked Hearst as a politician and worried about him bumping the Republican Party from the White House. Roosevelt also disliked Hearst as a publisher&mdash;of the nearly two dozen politicians exposed by Phillips, almost all were Republicans.

In the widely disseminated April speech, Roosevelt indicted a type of journalist who, he said, "never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muckrake, speedily becom[ing] not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil." Roosevelt did not deny the need for journalists to expose corruption. "There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or businessman, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business or in social life," Roosevelt said. He was concerned, however, that too many journalists failed to achieve accuracy, and that some knowingly printed lies.

On March 17, Roosevelt had presented an off-the-record version of this speech at the Gridiron Club in Washington, D.C. Ray Stannard Baker worried about the impact of Roosevelt's remarks on progressive journalism. Replying to Baker before going public with the speech, Roosevelt offered assurances that he had Hearst's publications, not McClure's Magazine, in mind. Baker had misunderstood some of the March version, Roosevelt said. "I want to let in light and air, but I do not want to let in sewer gas. If a room is fetid and the windows are bolted I am perfectly content to knock out the windows, but I would not knock a hole in the drain pipe." Referring to writers for a "yellow newspaper" or a "yellow magazine," Roosevelt said that they should not make "a ferocious attack on good men or even attacks [on] bad men with exaggeration or for things they have not done." Such journalists should be considered "a potent enemy of those of us who are really striving in good faith to expose bad men and drive them from power."

After Roosevelt coined the term "muckraking," it stuck to Tarbell, even if he had not been aiming at her. She argued with him, telling him "that we on McClure's were concerned only with facts, not with stirring up revolt." The label disturbed her so much for a while that she vowed to abandon her new style of investigative reporting. Roosevelt's speech "helped fix my resolution to have done for good and all with the subject that had brought it on me."

Tarbell could not pull away from her investigative reporting, however. The Standard Oil expos&eacute;, bolstered by the Rockefeller character sketch, spawned reform efforts within the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, the White House, and governors' mansions. It led to precedent-shattering court rulings as well as populist movements outside government institutions. A critical mass of Progressive voters began to coalesce. The reformers needed Tarbell, and she could not resist.

Excerpted from Taking on the Trust by Steve Weinberg. Copyright (c) 2008 by Steve Weinberg. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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